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Comment by lkbm | Hacker News Reader

I know it takes forever to do big projects, and diminishing returns are very much a thing, but 80% by 2035 feels like a really low bar.

Looking through various targets, it's far better than most countries[0], and Germany might not have the best geography for domestic renewable energy generation other than wind. (Not that it needs to be domestic. Being dependent on Russia for gas was a mistake. Being dependent on France for nuclear or Spain for solar feels a lot safer.)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandatory_renewable_energy_tar...

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That's true, but many German's reaaaaaaallly love renewable energy.

Just go to any rural area in north-west Germany in google maps and look at the solar on the roofs of all the farms.

https://www.google.com/maps/place/26655+Westerstede/@53.2438...

Took me 3 seconds.

I certainly do, but a lot of people I know don't really care.

... but we used to have a policy that made it profitable to install solar power (Erneuerbare-Energien-Gesetz).

Now it's all about the Eigenenergieverbrauch and avoiding CO2-tax, my friend. Have you heard of Leben mit der Energiewende TV?

On a sunny march day currently about 18% of all electricity is generated from solar.

Also there is a lots of wind in winter and solar works better in summer so the combination works quite well.

> 80% by 2035 feels like a really low bar.

Is this even possible? Doesn't it mean that renewable production fluctuates no more than 20%, throughout the whole year? Or, are you talking instantaneously, daytime, ideal conditions? It seems like grid scale storage that could handle these massive fluctuations (like nighttime) are pretty far off.

It would be interesting to see the cost analysis of that vs nuclear.

Oh, I assume it's much more expensive than nuclear. Personally, I tend to think of nuclear as renewable, though I guess it's not really; just carbon-neutral.

But even without nuclear I'd think it's viable, albeit expensive. You have to overbuild, add a lot of storage, and interconnect the continent (and maybe northern Africa) with high voltage transmission lines.

Domestically, night time isn't the big deal for Germany. They're 20% wind and only 8.5% solar[0]. They just need to be able to trade their wind output with countries whose wind blows at a different time.

Their geography seems like it would be good for pumped hydro storage, but they only have ~6GW capacity as of 2019[1], so maybe it's not.

[0] https://www.destatis.de/EN/Themes/Economic-Sectors-Enterpris...

[1] https://www.hydropower.org/country-profiles/germany

The ecosystem impact of damming up valleys is quite strongly disliked by many.

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